In the insurance industry individual agents or agencies interact with customers to service customer needs and to serve as the interface between the customer and an insurance underwriter. Insurance agents and agencies are legal representatives (“agents” in the legal sense) of one or more insurance underwriters. Insurance underwriters often, in turn, seek reinsurance services of a reinsurance company to help share the costs and risks of catastrophic losses. Insurance underwriting companies are therefore customers (in a sense) of the reinsurance vendors.
As used herein, the term “agent” shall mean individual agents or agencies comprising a number of agents. Further as used herein, “agent” includes brokers and producers associated with insurance agents or agencies. As used herein, “insurance company”, “insurer”, “insurance organization”, “insurance enterprise”, “underwriter”, and “underwriting company” shall all be used interchangeably as synonyms.
An insurance company may serve a large number of customers through associated agents. Large insurers typically insure customers in a number of states. Each state may impose its own unique regulatory requirements on underwriters doing business in its jurisdiction and/or on agents representing underwriters in that state. These state regulators may have unique regulatory documentation requirements and unique reporting and contact information. In determining whether to accept particular insurance requests from particular customers in particular states through particular agents, (i.e., to make an “appointment”), an insurance company must evaluate a large number of factors including, for example, information regarding the agent and information regarding licensing and regulatory matters within the state in which the underwriter proposes to do business. Often this information must be gathered from a number of diverse sources. Further, this collection of information must be reviewed by a number of different functions within the insurance organization.
Present industry practice typically has the requisite information distributed over a large number sources. Often materials are available only in paper (hard copy) form from a particular source. In other cases, where agents utilize data processing systems for storing such information, a wide variety of data formats and application programs are used by various agents and underwriters. It is common that the data processing systems used by various underwriters and agents are incompatible for the automated exchange of information.
The processes employed by insurance companies at present are therefore principally manual processes that gather data from numerous sources and exchange such information among reviewing entities in paper form—the lowest common denominator of the various formats employed by sources of needed information.
Still further, it is common that various stages of review within an insurance organization will require additional information missing or not supplied from an agent. The manual procedures therefore frequently are stalled awaiting receipt of such additional or missing information. Further, the manual processes presently used by insurance organizations rely on manual forwarding of information from one stage of the process to a next. Such manual processes are slow and error prone. Documents are frequently misplaced or lost in transmission from one stage of the process to a next. Incomplete or missing information imposes delays in the process. Some time later when information is received, the task to enter the data in required documents and resume processing may be missed.
These problems are particularly acute where an insurance organization is requested by a regulatory agency to produce documentation regarding an appointment and the associated licenses and review processes. In present systems, the information may be scattered among a variety of incompatible data processing systems or may only exist in paper form. Documentation of the review processes associated with the appointment may similarly be distributed over a variety of systems and/or paper records. Gather such information at the request of a regulator is therefore a particular problem faced by insurance companies.
It is evident from the above discussion that a need exists for improved workflow tracking and processing in the insurance industry.